Ep #196: It's Not Overstimulation, It's Under-Fulfillment

This time of year has a way of making many of us feel overstimulated, overwhelmed, and like we're constantly pouring ourselves into everyone else. But what if the real problem isn't that life is simply too busy? What if we're actually underfulfilled?

In this episode, I explore why so many women in midlife feel exhausted, disconnected, and tempted to check out through scrolling, binge-watching, or simply wishing they could escape. I share why these behaviors are often symptoms of something much deeper and how reconnecting with joy, purpose, and fulfillment can completely change the way we experience this season of life. I also share a personal story about choosing community and connection over perfection and why that simple decision reminded me what truly fills my soul.

My hope is that you'll begin making space for the things that restore your energy instead of only managing everyone else's needs.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• I explain the difference between feeling overstimulated and being underfulfilled.

• I share why midlife is an invitation to realign with who I am today.

• I discuss how joy and fulfillment build the capacity to care for others.

• I offer simple ways to reconnect with community, purpose, and personal happiness.

• I challenge you to intentionally schedule something that truly lights you up.

If this episode resonates with you, I'd love to hear what brings you joy. Reach out at hello@mikkigardner.com or DM me on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/mikkigardner/ and share what you're adding to your life this week, and let's continue creating a midlife that feels aligned, meaningful, and truly alive.

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Full Episode Transcript:

What if the reason your life suddenly feels so misaligned in midlife isn't because something is going wrong, but because something inside of you is finally waking up? Well, welcome to Led From Within. I'm Mikki Gardner and this is a podcast for women who are done outsourcing their authority and are ready to claim a life aligned with who they are today. Because midlife doesn't need to be a crisis.

It can be a return to yourself, to clarity, to courage, and to inner authority. So let's begin. Welcome back to the podcast.

So it's summer of 2026, and you might be feeling like it's 3pm the kids have been home for what feels like now forever. The calendar in your head has a bazillion tabs open and all you want to do is disappear. Whether that's into your phone, the glass of wine, or maybe you keep fantasizing and sort of daydreaming about what it would look like to just disappear. Well, if that's you right now, I want to have a conversation today around that.

Because oftentimes we feel like we're just so overstimulated, like it's all just too much. But what if there's a different diagnosis? I think summertime can often bring about sort of this overwhelm. I know for me, I think about the summer and I'm like, I just want a slow summer.

I just want to have spaciousness and to be outside and to be with family and friends. And I have this idealized fantasy in my head. But then I experience summer and it's anything but, right? And so maybe that's how you're feeling.

Because I think so many times everything is moving so, so fast that we end up just spending a lot of time doom scrolling or binging shows on Netflix or that daydream of what if I just laughed? Maybe you're finding yourself just snapping at the people that you love the most or feeling completely like out of touch and over Talked by like 6pm every day. Well, that's what we're going to talk about today because we need to understand that sometimes it's not about us being overstimulated, but we're actually under fulfilled. Here's what I mean.

Overstimulation. That's a symptom of when the root cause, when our life is arranged around everybody else's schedules, everybody else's needs, everybody else's expectations and our own joy and fulfillment is nowhere on the list. And I feel like this is what summer does. It turns up the volume because there's more logistics to contend with, maybe more travel, more sort of less structure, more loosey goosey feelings.

There's more requests on your time, there's less structure in your calendar. And so more of you just becomes the one who has to resource everybody. And that's when we find ourselves with these checking out behaviors. Whether it's the scrolling, the binging, the escape fantasies, and the behaviors aren't necessarily the problem.

It's just our nervous system trying to find the best available resource to find relief from what's going on. Because there's no real outlet for rest or for joy or for recuperation. And I feel like this really comes to a head in midlife. I look back in, you know, sort of my late 30s, early 40s, and I.

I mean, I could go, I could keep it all together, I could keep moving. But midlife becomes a quote, unquote crisis after we've spent decades upon decades, year upon year, month upon month, ignoring our souls, calling, our soul's request, our soul's need for alignment. It compounds every year when we're prioritizing everybody else, when we're prioritizing work, expectations over our own needs. And that gap between how you want to be living, how your soul needs you to be living and the way that you are living gets wider and wider until it becomes so loud that it cannot be ignored.

And that's when it becomes a crisis. So we need to reframe midlife, right? Not as a breakdown or not as a crisis, but an opportunity, an invitation to rearrange our priorities, our expectations, our identities. It's an invitation to get to know ourselves as we actually are now.

Not as we were at 25 or 35 and not who we are when we're performing for everybody else, but to actually get to know ourselves now. I mean, I've been living five decades on this earth now. I'm a different human from whenu I was in my 20s, my 30s, my 40s. And that's why midlife really gets to be this invitation to decide who am I now?

Based on the knowledge, the expertise, the wisdom, the life experiences that I have, what I know and what my soul wants me to know, what needs to change. And that's where I feel a lot of times when I'm working with clients that are having issues with parenting or relationships, or we're just simply feeling the overwhelm or overstimulation of summer. It's actually a trigger point that's calling out these long ignored callings that have come to the Surface and need our attention. So how do we start to like reframe this idea?

Well, so let's go back to the capacity, right? Those resources that we need to be able to handle our own lives, to be able to show up for the people that we love the most in a way that feels good for us and for them. Well, we have to understand that we have to be resourced. We have to be full, full of energy, full of life force, full of the capacity to give to others and to give to ourselves.

And I think fundamentally we have to understand that prioritizing our own joy and fulfillment is not selfish. It is not indulgent. It isn't just something that sounds great every once in a while. It's actually the thing builds the capacity to handle everything else.

You can't pour from an empty cup, as the old Chinese proverb says. But more specifically, joy, movement, connection, purpose. These are the things that replenish the reserves that we're drawing from all day long. And so we have to understand that just like our car that we have to fill up before drive down the highway, we have to do the same thing for ourselves.

And in midlife, when our bodies are changing, our hormones are changing, relationships are more challenging, all of the things happen. We have to resource ourself in order to give to others. So even if you don't let it be about yourself, even if you want to just have more to give to others, we have to be willing to shift and understand that prioritizing our own joy, our own fulfillment, our own health and well being is what gives us the capacity to be able to move forward. So what is.

I, uh, mean, what does this even look like? Okay, so it can be as simple as letting yourself m. Matter in different ways. Whether that's moving our body with intention, not as punishment, not as something to do, but because it actually feels good.

Building community, right? Real in life. Ril. In person connection.

Doing something purely for the joy of it, right? With no productivity payoff, no, you know, sort of validation from the outside. But doing something just because it feels good within our soul and our body, this is the skill that we have to rebuild. We know how to do this as children.

Children play, they experience joy, they just have a good time. And we lose that over, you know, when we're, when we're teenagers, when we're young adults, when we're parents, when we're working, when there's so much stress and strife and things in the world going on, we have not been taught, talked about, or encouraged to actually Go towards what brings us joy, what lights us up, what gives us energy, what fuels our bucket. And so we have to just start there, letting it be easy. We have to kind of relearn what it is that we actually even like because so many of us don't know what lights you up, what feels good, what adds energy to you versus drains energy.

Right. Many women haven't practiced that in so long, it's like the muscle is just atrophied. So we have to build it back up. And I want to be honest about something.

I'm actually doing this in my own life, like real time. One of my priorities this summer was while I'm home for the summer is to get as much connection and community as I can. And it's because I have a different community when I'm living in Florida and my Michigan community. I missed so much.

And so I wanted to actually get as much in person connection as I could while I was home. So yesterday, with a dear, dear friend of mine, we hosted a pop up cafe at my house. And so the morning into the early afternoon, the house was open. My friend made the most amazing pastries and gluten free, free options and all of the deliciousness that she does.

Cause she's extraordinary. You can see it on my Instagram. And I opened my home and invited all my friends and it was sort of a crapshoot who was coming. You had no idea who was coming and who wasn't.

And it was the most beautiful day. Just getting to see people hug them, hear what's going on, seeing everybody enjoy Jen's delicious food and coffee and sitting outside and feeling the sun on our skin. It was just such a beautiful morning. And that's where I get proof that while I might have been a little tired, I might have been running behind.

Maybe the house didn't look exactly the way I wanted. It wasn't about any of that. It was about me understanding that what is important to me right now is getting as much connection and community as I can. So I made that choice for myself in advance to do that.

And I just loved it. I loved the whole day. And it filled me up. Right.

I wasn't drained at the end of it. I was energized because I got so much connection from it. So here's my question to you.

What is one or two things you could do each week that you could add into your schedule that lights you up that you could actually put on the calendar and let yourself not cancel? And this isn't social media, this isn't the glass of wine. This isn't the checking out or the numbing. This is, what are those things that actually give you energy, that bring you joy, that bring you fulfillment, that lift you up, that add to your resources.

And then you can actually put it on your calendar and hold it with the same seriousness that you hold everybody else's needs. It could be a walk in nature. It could be a walk on the beach. It could be yoga.

It could be another form of intentional movement that feels good to you. It could be time with friends or community. It could be going to a new community meetup. It could be starting a new hobby.

Right? It could be trying a new restaurant once a week. It could be taking yourself out on a date. What would that look like?

To get dressed up and to take yourself out to lunch or to dinner? The options are, frankly, endless. And it doesn't matter so much what you choose. What matters is the decision m that, uh, you're allowing yourself to do something for the sole purpose of letting it feel good in your body, letting it rejuvenate you, letting it resource you by feeling joy and fulfillment and purpose.

So I want you to actually stop right now. I'm going to stop talking for a second, and I want you to pick one thing, and maybe you text a friend so that you, like, really lock it in here, but I want you to pick one thing, and before this episode ends, I want you to commit, put it on your calendar. What are you going to do? Because we can continue to feel overstimulated, over scheduled, over all the things, but if we are continuously under fulfilled, nothing is going to change.

Joy and purpose and fulfillment are, uh, the way back to the capacity to be able to handle everything else. Feeling that joy isn't a reward that needs to be earned. It's actually something that needs to be done in advance so that we can enjoy more things in life. And this is so crucial to midlife, because midlife isn't a crisis to survive.

It is a chance to rearrange your life and who you are around who you are today. Not holding yourselves to the standards of when you were 20 or 30 or the agreements or the expectations that you have. But to actually find out who you are today, what feels good to you, what do you need, what do you like, what lights you up. We've got to actually put some effort into this.

And then I want you to pick that one or two things this week that you can add in, and I invite you to share them. You can send it to me on a dm. You can send me the email that's in the show notes, but I want to hear. I want to hear from you.

What are you adding in? What are you willing to do? And I'm going to continue my summer of connection until I go back and I hope that you find something that brings you that kind of joy and connection as well. Until next week, have a great day and remember, you are 100% in charge of how you experience this midlife transition.

And so why don't we do it in a way that feels good and feels alive and brings you so much joy? Thanks so much for listening to today's episode.

I hope that it spoke to you and you found something useful to take away from it. If you did, I would be so grateful if you would take 2 seconds to subscribe to the show, which will help you because you won't miss another episode. And it would help me because you would never miss another episode. And if you are in the giving spirit and would take 30 seconds to rate and review this episode, it would do wonders for the show and for me.

Thanks so much for being here and I can't wait to talk to you again next week.